Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power

by Robert D. Kaplan

  Nisar Baluch, the general secretary of the Baluch Welfare Society, was the group’s leader. He had unruly black hair and a thick mustache. His fingertips tapped on the table as he lectured me. “The Pakistani army is the biggest land grabber,” he began. “It is giving away the coast of Baluchistan for peanuts to the Punjabis.

  “The Punjabi army wears uniforms, but the soldiers are actually terrorists,” he continued. “In Gwadar, the army is operating as a mafia, falsifying land records. They say we don’t have papers to prove our ownership of the land, though we’ve been there for centuries.” He told me that he was not against development and supported dialogue with the Pakistani authorities. “But when we talk about our rights, they accuse us of being Taliban.

  “We’re an oppressed nation,” he went on, never raising his voice, even as his finger-tapping grew in intensity. “There is no other choice but to fight. The whole world is now talking about Gwadar. The entire political establishment in this country is involved in the crime being perpetrated there.”

  Then came this warning: “No matter how hard they try to turn Gwadar into Dubai, it won’t work. There will be resistance. The future pipelines going to China will not be safe. The pipelines will have to cross through Baluch territory, and if our rights are violated, nothing will be secure.”

  This threat did not exist in isolation. Other nationalists had said that somewhere down the road Baluch insurgents would ambush more Chinese workers and kill them, and that would be the end of Gwadar.14

  Nisar Baluch was my warm-up to Nawab Khair Baksh Marri, the chief of the Marri tribe of Baluch, who had been engaged in combat with government forces on and off for sixty years, and whose son had recently been killed by Pakistani troops.* Marri greeted me in his plush Karachi villa, with massive exterior walls, giant plants, and ornate furniture, where his servants and bodyguards rested on rugs in the garden. He was old and wizened, with a cane, robes, and a beige-colored topi with wide indentations that distinguished it from the kind worn by Sindhis. Before us was a vast spread of local delicacies. Nawab Marri spoke a precise, hesitant, whispering English that, when combined with his clothes and the setting, gave him a certain charisma.

  “If we keep fighting,” he told me gently, “we will ignite an intifada like the Palestinians. It is the cause of my optimism that the young generation of Baluch will sustain a guerrilla war. Pakistan is not eternal. It is not likely to last. The British Empire, Pakistan, Burma, these have all been temporary creations. After Bangladesh left Pakistan in 1971,” he continued, in his mild and lecturing voice, “the only dynamic left within this country was the imperialist power of the Punjabi army. East Bengal [Bangladesh] was the most important element in Pakistan. The Bengalis were numerous enough to take on the Punjabis, but they seceded instead. Now the only option left for the Baluch is to fight.”

  He liked and trusted no one in Pakistan who was not Baluch, he told me. He thought little of the late Sindhi leader of the Pakistan People’s Party, Benazir Bhutto. After all, as he explained, it was under the government of her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, in the 1970s, that “our people were thrown out of helicopters, killed in mass graves, burned, had their nails torn out, their bones broken … so I was not happy to greet her.”

  And what about Punjabi overtures to make amends with the Baluch? I asked. “We say to these Punjabis,” he replied, still in his sweet regal voice, “leave us alone, get lost, we don’t need your direction, your brotherliness. If Punjab continues to occupy us with the help of the American imperialists, then eventually our name will be nowhere in the soil.”

  He explained that Baluchistan overlapped three countries—Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan—and would eventually triumph as the central governments of all those lands weakened. In his view, Gwadar was just the latest Punjabi plot that would prove temporary. The Baluch would simply bomb the new roads and future pipelines leading out of there.

  He was a man full of blunt insults, who abjured the give-and-take of politics, on which he seemed to have given up. As I was leaving his villa, it struck me that whether Gwadar developed or not depended signally on how the government in Islamabad behaved. If it did not make a grand bargain with the Baluch of the scope that would isolate embittered men like Marri and Nisar Baluch, then indeed the mega-project near the Iranian border would become another lost city in the sand, beset by local rebellion. Although, if it did make such a bargain, allowing Baluchistan to emerge as a region-state under the larger rubric of a democratic and decentralized Pakistan, then the traditional fishing village that I saw could well give way to a pulsing Rotterdam of the Arabian Sea, with tentacles reaching northward to Samarkand.

  But nothing was destiny.

  Whereas Baluchistan constitutes the easternmost limb of the Middle East, with its evocation of peninsular Arabia, Sindh and the snaking Indus River valley that territorially defines it mark the true beginning of the Indian Subcontinent, though, of course, history and geography are subtler still. Sindh, too, albeit to a somewhat lesser extent than Makran, is a transition zone with a long record of invasions. In particular, there were the Arab conquests in the eighth and ninth centuries, and consequent Arab commercial activity in the urban areas.15 Perhaps the best way to think of the beginning of the Subcontinent is less of a hard border than a series of gradations.

  Both the words “India” and “Hindu” derive from Sindhu, which in Persian became Hind, and, in Greek and Roman, Ind. The Indus (as it was called by these rulers of the Western classical world) and interior Sindh beckoned ever northward for hundreds of miles, from the sprawling urban city-state of Karachi on the Arabian Sea toward the fertile Punjab and the Karakorams—the dizzyingly steep “Black Gravel” range in Turkic, which adjoin the Himalayas.*

  Karachi was a place of jarring aesthetics, unappealing at least to the Western eye. Whereas verticality is a sign of urban life in Europe—of venerable human settlement ascending upward in a confined and intimate space—Karachi was a horizontal city of the future, with many small neighborhood centers and comparatively little of a central core. From a rooftop barbecue restaurant, I gazed out at vast panels of sewage water egressing into the port, which was studded with dinosauric gantry cranes; and in the other direction I saw ranks of cruddy and cracked apartment blocks of undressed cement, festooned with drying clothes in an oily ash-smeared haze. Raggedy palms and mangrove swamps were bordered by heaps of cinder blocks. The city lacked any focal point or identifiable skyline. Mounds of garbage, rocks, dirt, tires, bricks, and withered tree stumps helped define the urban space. Private security guards were ever-present, along with liquor stores and radical Islamic madrassas that I had visited on previous trips here. Indeed, the city’s very contradictions were one of its saving graces. Without the anchor of a substantive past, compared to other cities in the Subcontinent, Karachi has more possibilities to alter itself radically over the decades, taking advantage of global trends in urban living and architectural design. We all know about terrorist Karachi, which certainly is a reality, but a city of this size is many faceted. I was intrigued more than I was put off.

  Karachi was a site of massive building projects financed by money from the Gulf, but no one project seemed to be architecturally coordinated with another. High marble fortress walls with buzzers and armed guards indicated how this was a city of hidden wealth. Glitzy stores and Western chain restaurants peeked out amidst sprawling slums that were, in turn, roamed over by armies of stray dogs and gray-breasted crows. Women in gold jewelry and fine gaudy silks shared sidewalks with hunchbacks and amputees. Because of the mishmash of poverty and wealth, neighborhoods were better and worse rather than good and bad. The better ones had hollow names like Clifton and Defense, evoking literally nothing.

  With few vertical impediments, the Muslim prayer call swept like a tidal wave through the city’s vast open spaces. Without a tradition like Lahore, and with significant inter-ethnic violence between Sindhis and mohajirs (Muslim immigrants from India), and between Pushtuns and Bal
uch, the future of this Arabian Sea port seemed open to two healing, dynamic forces: those of radical Islamic orthodoxy and of soulless materialism, the offerings, respectively, of Saudi Arabia and of Dubai. Truly, Karachi represented the other side of the moon from nearby Muscat, which, with its heavily zoned and blinding white, graceful Mughal-like ambience, bespoke—through a strong architectural tradition—a stalwart and enlightened state that protected its cities from the dark side of globalization, even as Karachi seemed to be devoured by it. The state, unlike in Oman, was little to be seen. In this sense, Karachi was the definitive Pakistani city. Unlike Lahore and the great Mughal metropolises of India, Karachi was an isolated seaboard settlement of 400,000 at the time of partition, and grew into a mega-city of 16 million without a prideful identity or past.

  Half of Karachi’s population lived in squatter settlements known as katchiabaadis. Barely 50 percent of the city’s water needs were being met, and there were constant power outages, known locally by the quaint term “load-shedding.”16 And yet Karachi, I thought, might be saved by its very pluralism. It was a port after all, with a vibrant Hindu population and a community of Zoroastrians who exposed their dead to vultures on hills known as “towers of silence.” No one sort of religious fundamentalism would go far here before being hedged in by other beliefs. The very fact of the sea, which brought to bear the various contradictory influences of the Indian Ocean, might ultimately protect Karachi from its worst aspects.

  Despite the tradition of inter-ethnic violence, the city usually seemed peaceful. One day I drove out past the inland bays and salt ponds, past the derelict ancient storefronts with their scabby signage and cinder-block exteriors—the very essence of flatness and destitution—and found a throng of picnicking families on the beach at Manora headland, enjoying the pounding, sulfurous surf of the Arabian Sea in all its sudsy force, with no jetties to break up the wave formations. It was just after Friday prayers. The beach was clean, unlike most other places in Karachi, and children were taking rides up and down the shore on camels bedecked with colorfully embroidered saddles. Families were huddled in groups on the sand, smiling and taking photos of one another. Teenagers gathered at corroded drinks and fish stands. Some of the women were dressed in shapely, fashionable shalwar kameezes and wore makeup. Others were covered from head to toe in black.

  The scene made me think of another one I had witnessed some years back at the Yemeni port of Mukalla, some 350 miles to the west of Dhofar. The beachfront in Mukalla was divided into two parts: one for men and teenage boys; another for women and their young children. The women were veiled and most of the men had beards. It was a serene communal space, with throngs of the proletarian faithful enjoying the first evening sea breezes.17 The West, and the United States in particular, had no choice but to make its peace with such crowds. Here in its quiet understated way was global power, resting within a deep, anchoring belief.

  Both beach scenes bespoke a simple intimacy, with this one here in Karachi somewhat more cosmopolitan. A Hindu temple—tawny, intricate, and dilapidated—stood sentinel in the background. Here was a vision of Karachi as a modest-sized, multi-confessional fishing community—a satellite of Mumbai and other cities on the western coast of India, something that before its architectural despoliation it was always meant to be. You could see that as soon as Karachi had been cut off from India proper because of the creation of Muslim Pakistan it had lost its organic connection to these other urban centers, and thus developed as an isolated Islamic city-state without the enriching advantage of a more variegated, partially Hindu soul. And so as vast as it had become, Karachi somehow lacked substance. Maybe globalization by way of Dubai and other Gulf cities was the answer after all. Karachi had lost India, but would gain the Gulf as its immediate neighbor.

  Its young mayor, Syed Mustafa Kamal, talked of an information technology center that would make the city a transshipment point of ideas between the Gulf and Asia.18 Yet, there were other visions of Karachi, not entirely contradictory with the young mayor’s, but more in keeping with what the Baluch had in mind for their province. These visions, which saw Karachi as the capital of an independent or at least an autonomous Sindh, conceived of both Pakistan and India as not the last words in human political organization for the Subcontinent.

  I was reminded that Sindh had been occupied for six thousand years, and by virtue of it being a racial mixture of Arabs, Persians, and other passing conquerors, it retained a strong cultural and historical identity. Sindh had been part of Bombay Presidency, a province of British India until 1936, when it became a province in its own right tied to New Delhi. Sindh joined Pakistan less because it was Muslim than because the new state promised Sindh autonomy, which it never got. “Instead, we became a colony of the Punjabis,” was the refrain. For Sindhi nationalists, the Arabian Sea might yet return to its pre-Portuguese medieval past, as a place of regions and principalities, in which Kabul and Karachi were as united with Lahore and Delhi as Delhi was with Bangalore and the rest of south India. And in this firmament, aided by globalization, as they told me, the Sunnis and Shias of Sindh could deal, respectively, with Saudi Arabia and Iran without the intercession of Islamabad.

  As unforgiving as some of these voices were, their anger had a reasonable focus, for it was directed against the extreme centralization of political life toward the populous Punjabi heartland that had robbed the state of Pakistan of vitality.

  I met Ali Hassan Chandio, the vice-chairman of the Sindh Progressive Party, in an empty room with geckos on the walls. The monsoon wind blew through the open windows. We were located a few blocks from the site of a new mall and apartment complex to be built by a Dubai firm. Whatever was left of the past in Karachi was being wiped out. Chandio spoke to me of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, who had conceived of a state in which the various national peoples would be given their rights. But instead, Jinnah died soon after Pakistan’s birth, and the military centralized power. “In India there have been no coups, while in Pakistan there has frequently been martial law. We want the Punjabi military to go back to the barracks. Sindhis should only be part of Pakistan if it is democratic like India. India,” he emphasized, “despite all its wars and assassinations and other violence, is still the role model for South Asia.” Like all the Baluch and Sindhi nationalists I met along Pakistan’s Arabian Sea coast, he spoke openly in positive terms about India, which he and the others saw as their ally against the very state in which they felt themselves to be prisoners. Indeed, they all spoke to me about the need for an open border with the neighboring Indian state of Gujarat, India’s most economically dynamic region, with a quarter of that country’s investment. Gujarat’s very proximity and strength made them aware of their own failure.

  Bashir Khan Qureshi, the leader of the Sindhi Lives Progressive Front, met me in his home at Karachi’s eastern edge. Plastic bags blew in the wind. Crows were ubiquitous. The ashtrays in the room overflowed. A fan blew loudly. A big and handsome man, he spoke easily above it.

  “Pakistan is itself a breach of contract,” he told me. He reiterated the whole history of the state from the minority Baluch and Sindhi point of view, paying particular attention to the secession of Bangladesh in 1971 and the inspiration the Bengalis there have given to the dreams of other minorities. One more coup in Pakistan, Qureshi said, and there would be civil war in Baluchistan and Sindh.

  Maybe it was the bleak surroundings in this room, which seemed about to be submerged by the parched desert, but I distrusted his vision. It was too clear-cut. It worked only as long as you believed that Sindh was a cohesive and definable entity that could be neatly severed from Pakistan. But it couldn’t, for Sindhis were a minority in Karachi itself. After partition, millions of Muslim Indians (mohajirs) had fled here and formed their own political groupings. Then there were the Pushtun, Punjabi, Hindu, and other minorities. As past violence showed, Sindhis might get their way here only through urban warfare. And that was to say nothing of the Sunni-Shia split within t
he Sindhi community itself, which had also periodically led to violence. Because of the vicissitudes of migration over recent decades, at least in Karachi Sindh had become something of an abstraction (as had the concept of Baluchistan in Quetta, because of the influx of Pushtuns). Like Gwadar, Karachi could emerge as an autonomous city-state of the future. And Sindh, as well as Baluchistan, could gain autonomy in a far more loosely controlled and democratic future Pakistan. But Pakistan as it currently existed, I felt, would not go so quietly into history. And the Mughal and medieval principalities of the past were only vague comparisons for what might come about, mainly because of the mixing of populations in the urban areas. Future decades would have to witness political structures of extreme subtlety.

  Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the Quaid-i-Azam (father of the nation), the creator of the state that many have called the most dangerous and explosive in the world, is buried in the middle of a vast immaculately landscaped garden in central Karachi. So beautiful and perfect is the garden that once inside it you realize just how poor and chaotic much of the rest of the city is. The mausoleum itself is a bullet-shaped dome socketed into inward-sloping marble walls. The geometric design is so severe and cubistic it brings to mind all the too-neat abstractions of political ideology. Meanwhile, the flashy marble interior suggests a shopping mall, or the duty-free zone of one of the new airports in the Gulf. There is something both edgy and curiously vacant about the whole affair. Just as the tomb looked out of place amid Karachi’s ratty mishmash, Jinnah’s model-state has so far proved unsuited for the ground-level realities of a messy world.